21 Years Down The Road: What Happened on I-10 East

July 4, 1990.   Fresh out of college with a degree in English Lit., I was working for a company related to the oil industry.  I carried parts and people in a big van, driving the Interstates and the dirtier, lovelier back-roads all along the Gulf Coast.

It was late, and I'd been driving alone for close to fourteen hours.  It was a stretch of road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the last leg of a jump out to Port Arthur, Texas, and back.

The first thing I saw was a car off on the shoulder, its hazard lights blinking, with some young black men in ratty t-shirts running back towards me waving their hands.  I slowed down and stopped in the middle of the Interstate.  There was a car spun side-on in the fast-lane.  I put on my hazard lights and blocked traffic from running into it, got out and crossed over to the kids who were frantically waving down traffic.

Then I saw it: a car upside down in the dark, its shattered glass all over the wet grass near the tree-line.

"There's somebody in there," one of the kids told me.  I could see blood, black in the glare of headlights, smeared on the car.  Somebody was struggling out.

He bent over the car.  For a long time he knelt there, doing something.  Late night traffic on the Fourth of July was slowly backing up behind my van.  It took him ten minutes.   A couple of guys were helping him, but he kept waving them off.  I stayed where I was: I'd like to say I was helping at least by slowing down traffic or something.  Honestly, I don't remember.

The man who came towards me wore a linen shirt covered in blood.  He was short, balding a little, but powerfully built.  He spoke with an English accent that I'd heard before in the West Country.

In his arms was the unconscious body of his daughter.  I would find out later she was eight years old, and he had pulled her from the back seat.  "We flipped over," he said, dazed and in shock.  "What happened to us?"

What had happened was that he had fallen asleep at the wheel on the way back from a Fourth of July party in Lafayette.

I remember the hoarse cries of cicadas and frogs in the woods, and slapping at a mosquito on my arm.  Traffic backed up.  Somebody leaned on a horn until the news spread backward through the stopped vehicles, and something made everybody on that stretch of road uncommonly quiet and patient.

This was before cell phones were common.  But somebody in a BMW pulled up and had one of those clunky enormous phones that used to live in rich peoples' cars.  He himself reminded me of Tom Cruise: dark good looks, an ironic air.  He dialed 9-1-1 and called in an emergency with injury.  Next to him, his beautiful blond wife kept opening her door and almost getting out.  She said, a little lamely but with touching timidity, "I have some towels."  Her husband said something like, "We can't help here.  Shut the door."  She started to speak, but he eased the Beamer around my van and shot on down the Interstate.

The little knot of kids who had been first on the scene were standing with me around the body of the little girl.  Her father had laid her there on the asphalt and was standing, looking around, asking where an ambulance was.

I asked the kids to run through the traffic that was now stretching back a half mile or so, looking for a doctor.

I don't remember much except kneeling next to the girl who was dead or dying, the sound of a scream somewhere in the stopped traffic: evidently the driver's wife, in a separate car, had arrived and seen what had happened, and was blaming him.   There were loud screams and recriminations.  For some reason they didn't come close to the girl's body.  I was standing there with this black kid who kept looking at me.  I was grateful he didn't speak, but I think he knew we were sharing in a strange kind of communion.  I heard the sound of sirens.  I don't think she had been lying on the asphalt for more than two minutes.

And I remember the arrival of the paramedics in a bright red truck.  They arranged lights around the scene.  They worked futilely, heroically.  I didn't want to leave.  A cop started directing traffic around the van while they were urgently blowing air into the girl's mouth.

I couldn't see the color of the girl's face because of the blood.

Sometimes the memory seems like a bird that I almost catch in my hand.  Some nights, I think that maybe my memory plays tricks on me.

But I never wanted to leave that Interstate, I know that.  I know that it was with some difficulty that I acknowledged it was time for me to go.

She was dead already when I left. 

And I sometimes wonder whether I am inventing the memory that seems so clear, the memory of a feeling like a curtain parting to admit her, or to let her slip out from under this world, to leave behind memories that now turn a little pale and translucent.  

She would be 29 this July 4.

Yesterday my daughter turned 14, and I will be driving from Shreveport to New Orleans, and passing that stretch of Interstate where I never drive without thinking of her ash-blond hair, and a face darkened, as if the night and her own blood had agreed to shield her as she went from the gaze of those of us who are still living.

It is as if they had conspired to make us wonder what it was we remembered.

Comments

[Julia]

What a powerful, sobering post.